


what we fear and what we become

by The-Immortal-Moon (LunaKat)



Series: What We Are (FMA Angst Week 2018) [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Burns, F/M, FMA Angst Week 2018, Guilt, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-18 12:05:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15485373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/The-Immortal-Moon
Summary: For FMA angst week 2018. Day 3: ScarsThe scars are a good thing, in that sense.





	what we fear and what we become

**Author's Note:**

> **Scar**  
>  (noun)  
> \--a mark left on the skin or within body tissue where a wound, burn, or sore has not healed completely and fibrous connective tissue has developed.

The wounds on her back are still raw, still sore. They are healing, but not fast enough. Every moment, every shift of fabric against her back, sends dull aching through her skin. Riza refrains from sucking in harsh breaths or gritting her teeth too visibly, a skill that she finds herself taking a startingly amount of pride in. After all, why should she be allowed to suffer and feel pain when there is an entire people that have been decimated by her and people like her?

Blue uniforms. Gold trim. Browning Hi-Power, standard issue. All of these she knows well, perhaps too well.

It has been several weeks since the war ended, all too suddenly and rather inexplicably. She still wakes up expecting hot desert sun and hot desert winds and sand in some rather uncomfortable places. She still goes outside with her eyes narrowed into an instinctive squint, but the sky in East City is not blazing with debilitating heat. There is no gunfire in the streets or snipers poised in high stone towers, no people with brown skin and white hair and red eyes she has been ordered to take down.

If she were more noble, perhaps she would have kept count of the times she pulled the trigger. But being a wretched soldier who became tragically inured to the sound of gunfire, she never bothered with it, never even tried to keep count. By the time the thought occurred to her, it was already too late, and the number had grown hazy.

All the while, her back aches.

Complaining about it feels like a selfish indulgence of some kind. How dare she, when there are people so much worse off than her. As if she could even begin to understand what those people went through.

 _I wonder if anyone escaped_ , she thinks sometimes. _I wonder if anyone who was burned managed to walk away. I wonder if any of them feel the same pain I do._

It’s a good thing, she tells herself. The pain is deserved and, with massive swathes of her skin reduces to shiny patches of puckered pink flesh, it means that her father’s research will never come to fruition a second time.

“I can’t burn it all,” he’d told her. She had been too busy writhing in pain to respond. “It’d kill you. The best I can do is burn off patches—at least that way you’ll survive.”

He’d sounded unapologetic when he said that, at least in her memory, but maybe her memory is wrong. Maybe a lot of her memories are wrong. Maybe she killed millions instead of hundreds. Maybe she wasn’t so efficient. Maybe she had to pump innocents full of lead, instead of offering a swift and sudden death.

The scars are a good thing, in that sense. They destroy the pristineness of her skin the way the war did the pristineness of her soul. With these scars, she can guarentee no one else will become a destroyer like Roy Mustang. No more childhood friends, nice boys with kind eyes and a bright, ambitious dream will be allowed to become horrific murderers haunted by the shadow of smoke and cinders.

And they’re proof, too. Proof of suffering. Proof of survival. Having scars, being marred and beaten and battered and having evidence of when you were once bleeding, means you are strong.

Major Mustang has no visible scars. The evidence of the war has not been ingrained onto his skin the way it has hers. Instead, his eyes have swallowed it all, drawn it into those twin dark vortexes. All the pain, all the fear, all the self-hatred and disgust and death. He’s taken it all upon himself, without any outward indication of what has occurred. He does not falter in his stride, does not lower his eyes in shame. Instead he walks with his head held high and his shoulders back and moves on—but never forgets.

“I have a plan to change the country,” he told her yesterday, when he knocked on her door out of the blue and invited himself into her private space. The last time she allowed him so close was when he set fire to her flesh. “To rise through the ranks and change the military from the inside out.”

“You want me to follow you,” she’d surmised. Her throat ached with the remembrance of blood-stench, of smoke from charred bodies.

He’d bowed his head, and it was perhaps the first act of shame she had seen from him since he refused to meet her eyes in that cheap motel. “I don’t _want_ you to do anything. You can do what you wish. I... only felt it necessary to inform you.”

He didn’t need to say why he felt it necessary. She knew. Because she’d given him her father’s infernal research. Because she’d followed him into a war that was never meant to be her responsibility. Because she was the reason he is who and what he is today.

“You haven’t left the military yet,” he mused.

“It felt wrong to run away,” she said.

He nodded, then suddenly winced. “...how’s your back?”

“Recovering.” And that had been the end of it.

Now, she shows up to Eastern Command with a request file tucked into the crook of her elbow. She slips it into the rest of her paperwork and leaves it on the desk of the officer she had been assigned under. He is an old, old man who managed to avoid war by virtue of a bad back and a hefty family name. He does not look twice at her, nor does he value her. He will not blink at the request, and will not find an adequate reason to deny her. He will grant it, thinking nothing of it.

As she goes home at the end of the day, she does so with the anticipation that, tomorrow, she will be reporting to a commander with scars just like hers. Even if she's the only one who can see them.

**Author's Note:**

> I was tempted to write about Scar but I felt like that would be a little on the nose.


End file.
